The Sun Is Shining, The Birds Are Singing, The Tulips Are In Bloom. Shut th' F*ck Up.

I'M BUSY, but it's mostly Kabuki. I did the lawnmower kabuki yesterday evening; I've been doing the new lighting kabuki for a week now, with only stylized success; I'll have to kabuki the hibachi, as soon as I get an hibachi.

I think I've mentioned my friend Cowboy Clint before, a real working cowboy who'd been forced to relocate to the midwest after a Class B Felony Messing with Texas beef one drunken night, who experienced the Urban Cowboy contagion personally, not just metaphorically: he had to change his entire wardrobe or look like a Disco refugee. (I had to give up cigars twenty years ago, when the likes of California's health-nut governor started smoking them as symbols of the trendy Non-PC kabuki, and how massive wealth gave you the right to spit in everyone else's face, but that's not nearly the same.) Sort of thing happens with language all the time; particularly, in politics, with the lamentable death-by-overuse-and-unlettered-semantic-shift of the once-useful spin. It happens often enough--as in constantly--that it ought go unremarked. Or, assuming you are Slate, to have the unremarkability remarked upon:

It may seem P.C. or peevish to ask writers to resist kabuki. (Is Kabuki resistance itself Kabuki?) The request is impractical, I admit

But…?

But how would you feel if your favorite art form, ballet or truckers' quilts, say, became another nation's derogatory epithet? How many Americans today steer clear of actual Kabuki (it is regularly performed here) because of the word's reputation?

I'm guessing "none".

If pesto is Out, bring us two orders of what's In! (Missed a segue, there, but nobody bats 1000.) If this sort of thing is a problem, it'll self-correct, because the same overusers are the same mid-craze adaptors ready to kill what's next via unreflective overexposure. It's more disturbing by several orders of magnitude that some Slate-y arbiter of political phrasemaking still uses "P.C." to mean "raising niggling objections" thirty years after that one was driven off the rails.

But Lackman's real point, or "point", is not that kabuki should be banished for Incipient Trendiness Wasting Disease, nor Overuse by the Unfashionably Middle-Aged, but that it's being misused altogether:

Health care reform recently brought Kabuki to mind for both Rush Limbaugh—"what you have here is 'Kabuki theater' "—and New York Times columnist Frank Rich: "[I]f I were to place an incautious bet on which political event will prove the most significant of February 2010, I wouldn't choose the kabuki health care summit." For The New Yorker's George Packer, all the capital's a Far Eastern stage, and all its men and women merely players. "I looked for answers outside the Kabuki theatre of Washington personalities."

Pundits use Kabuki as a synonym for "posturing." The New Republic's Michael Crowley, for example, has defined it as a "performance, in which nothing substantive is done." But there's nothing "kabuki" about the real Kabuki. Kabuki, I'll have you know, is one of UNESCO's Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity! And it's nothing like politics. It does indeed use stylized gestures, expressions, and intonations, but it's far from empty and monotonous.

Well, the Healthcare Summit, e.g., may have been monotonous--like everything more complicated that a Tweet in some circles--but it wasn't empty, either. To me (pace Rush and Packer) its use has always referred to Kabuki dance, stylized movements which can be read by the knowledgeable, but are incomprehensible, or easily misconstrued, by everyone else. Limbaugh and Rich might easily help kill the thing through overuse, but mindlessness (and I wouldn't say either is de facto wrong, above) is strictly on them.

The fat lady has to sing before the opera's over, a delightful, useful, and, yes, overused folk observation which hasn't affected my enjoyment of 19th century musical theatre one whit. It's a sort of cultural enallage, where the effective but incorrect grammatical form ("We was robbed!") is replaced by a comic Philistinism. Kabuki is a stylized mishmash to yer average American. Even your above-average American. And the last people on earth who have a right to take offense at some other culture's portrayal of them are the Japanese.

Where'd I put that segue? Anyhow:

FOOD partisanship doesn’t usually reach the same heights of animosity as the political variety, except in the case of the anti-cilantro party.

Well, I am still working on my food blog…

Culinary sophistication is no guarantee of immunity from cilantrophobia. In a television interview in 2002, Larry King asked Julia Child which foods she hated. She responded: “Cilantro and arugula I don’t like at all. They’re both green herbs, they have kind of a dead taste to me.”

“So you would never order it?” Mr. King asked.

“Never,” she responded. “I would pick it out if I saw it and throw it on the floor.”

God bless that woman, and would she'd lived to be 200. (There's a greeting card my neighbors sent me hanging on the fridge now, with her wonderful line "It's so beautifully arranged on the plate you just know someone's fingers have been all over it".) She overstates the case against, ahem, roquette, no doubt due to the power of sledgehammer trendiness….

[Which reminds me. I have to travel two miles to the specialty birdfeeding store to get plain suet. There are fourteen different suets at the grocery store, and they all read like salsas Rachael Ray's production staff spitballed. Blueberry Mango. Peanut Graham. Cilantro.]

But if anything she lets cilantro off far too easy. Throwing it on the floor would mean you could still smell it. Cilantro should be taken immediately to the dumpster, and a note pinned to the thing apologizing to the garbage man. It's the chef who should be hurled to the floor.

And look, yes indeedy, I don't care for the smell. But I've made my own curries, I make my own sausage, I've et three-year-old goat cheese. It's not the vile reek, whether or not that's genetically or culturally affected; it's the goddam incontinent use, which is wedded to, and symbolic of, the rampant food idiocy which holds that food--and, worse, every fucking dish on the table--is supposed not so much to be seasoned as wrestled to the ground and lemon-cilantro-peppersprayed into submission. Alberto Moravia once remarked that, while the ratio of literacy to illiteracy was constant, nowadays the illiterates can read; and nowadays the ham-fisted imagine they are producing something edible, like the kid who imagines burning ants with a magnifying glass makes him a research biologist.

Helen Leach, an anthropologist at the University of Otago in New Zealand, has traced unflattering remarks about cilantro flavor and the bug etymology — not endorsed by modern dictionaries —

May we just note here that, so far as we are aware, no lexicographers dabble in ethnography?

back to English garden books and French farming books from around 1600, when medieval dishes had fallen out of fashion. She suggests that cilantro was disparaged as part of a general effort to define the new European table against the flavors of the old.

So, cilantro was unfairly banned 400 years ago? Explains why my neighbor put four centuries' worth of the stuff in that salsa he made.

The senses of smell and taste evolved to evoke strong emotions, [Dr. Jay Gottfried, neuroscientist] explained, because they were critical to finding food and mates and avoiding poisons and predators. When we taste a food, the brain searches its memory to find a pattern from past experience that the flavor belongs to. Then it uses that pattern to create a perception of flavor, including an evaluation of its desirability.

If the flavor doesn’t fit a familiar food experience, and instead fits into a pattern that involves chemical cleaning agents and dirt, or crawly insects, then the brain highlights the mismatch and the potential threat to our safety.

Well, except, of course, that crawly insects and dirt have been on the menu for several million years. And if you're thinking of putting cilantro, which is Greek for "Mediterranean Death Herb" by the way, in my salad, I'll just have the Lemon Pledge instead.

18 comments:

I have no comment on the kabuki meme, since I tend to ignore the overuse of wrong words that eventually become cliches. However, I just finished reading that cilantro article prior to visiting your blog and I was disappointed in it because I was hoping there was an actual scientific explanation for why cilantro tastes like soap to some people and not others; kind of like why some people can curl their tongues or whistle with their fingers (both of which I can do). I thought there was something genetic about it.

Verily, you miss out on one of the glories of taqueria cuisine: onions chopped with cilantro, layered lavishly over a lengua taco or a burritio al pastor. I've been to taquerias that withhold the cilantro; I never go back.

I enjoy the taste of cilantro, and we grow arugula, AKA as rocket, in our vegetable garden. It has a lovely peppery bite to it in a salad.I admired Julia Child, but so what if she hated them? Chacun a son gout, each to his own taste.

It certainly doesn't taste like soap to me. To be fair to Riley and Ms. Child, though, I would not expect or desire to taste cilantro in my salad, and I can only imagine the combination of bitter greens and cilantro, without the fat of grilled meat to balance and mellow it, to be... um... pungent, and not in a good way.

Does it matter what you call it? Because I don't actually order stuff with cilantro in it, but I have a mad passion for fresh coriander chutney. It's good in chili too.

And it could never, in any form, be as soapy and revolting as tarragon, the herb that started the whole fashionable herbs on salad bars mess to begin with. Which has, thankfully, mostly disappeared, although lemon grass is trying hard to take its place.

As far as the kabuki thing goes, since the people who use it very often imply some form of puppeteering is involved the proper art form would be Bunraku. But pundits have probably never heard of it, much less seen a performance.

Cilantro? If I want to eat soap I'll eat soap thenkyewverymuch. And Julia is absolutly right about tarragon. Too. Also.

I am saddened at this outpouring of contempt for Cilantro. I discovered it by accident, thinking I was buying Parsley, and being surprised and delighted by its wonderful aroma. What a find! I thought, little realizing I was following a faux-snobby Trend.

But I understand those to whom it smells like soap. Roses smell like Raid Bug Spray to me. I hate 'em.

In an MSM where "Socialism" is tossed about like so much cilantro (cilantro has a soapy taste soap to me as well - genetics sounds likely. If I want to taste soap I'll eat lutefisk), this lamebrain has a problem with "Kabuki"?

Doghouse, I am astounded, flummoxed, struck all of a heap by your comment on FLAVORED SUETS!!!! I live near a tres trend-conscious supermarket that once had truffles on sale (flown over in season speshly - hey, it was the 80s) for like 92 bucks/pound. But I have never, never heard of flavored suets before (unless the bird-feeding sort, which tend to have bits of insects or dried berries mixed in, are considered "flavored").

And, not to put too fine a point on it, this is northern NJ, cheek by jowl with Manhattan, not, um, Indiana....no offense intended.

Astonishing. (BTW, thanx for the explanation of enallage. Usually you leave us consumers to fend for ourselves.)

My mother always just used cans of bacon grease as 'suet' and the birds loved it. I also collect the grease from cooking meat for the kids and then roll the hardened can shapes in bird seed, hang them from a tree and voila! A lovely treat.

There is, in South Asian cuisine, a holy trinity of flavors that transcends its individual components: fish sauce, lime juice, and cilantro. It is the catalysis of these that turned the switch in my head from crushed-bugs/soap to a bright, cheerful flavor note that reacts incredibly well with all meaty fats. Vietnamese or Mexican food without cilantro and lime is almost inedible.